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“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” – Rumi

I was up insanely early one morning, because my subconscious decided to throw some deep shit at me, right in that space between sleep and awake, when we are most open to information. For me, for anyone else that needs to hear it, let me lay it down.

It all came together after a discussion one night with a few people about pain and about taking responsibility for your own feelings, a topic I have discussed here before. I realized that one person in the discussion was not taking responsibility for their feelings, and in doing so, they were giving another power over them. As long as you give another responsibility for your feelings, you give them your power! That’s a big realization for me!

For this post I’ll call them X and Y.

The reason X was able to take Y’s power like that is because Y had already given it up. Y talked about X attacking their past abuse, and that being a weakness for them. What that means is, Y still had not taken responsibility for their pain from those previous attacks. Until Y can find a way to own their feelings about their past, Y will be giving those past events power over themselves, power that people like X can and will use.

Of course, the obvious question is, what do I mean by owning your feelings, or taking responsibility for your pain?

In my post, “Fear and Control”, I talked about how all we really have control over is our own happiness, or, our own emotions. This is what I mean by owning your pain. I mean to recognize that you are the one in control; you are the one who is choosing to be in pain.
This can seem very callous, especially when dealing with issues like childhood abuse, but it is not meant as a judgement, or to place blame with the victim. It is about freeing them from the victim mentality; to free them from the very idea that they are a victim. It is all about taking your power back.

This is not to say that abuse is good or right. No, it is to say that all psychological pain you feel is still your responsibility, and you will always be the victim, in your own mind, until you take responsibility for, or ownership of, your pain.
When you can say “those events happened to me, those people were wrong to do that to me, I feel pain over those events” then you have taken the first step.

The next step is to release all pain and other negative emotions associated with those events. This can be very difficult, and I highly recommend getting the help of someone you trust with this. I use the techniques of EMDR and EFT for clearing emotions. You may have others that work for you. The point is. To complete the next step, and be truly free from those past events, and the idea of victimization, you must reach a point where you can recall those events in detail and say ” those events happened to me and I felt pain”, without feeling the pain in the present moment. They are merely events that happened in the past.

Then you will have owned your pain and released it. Then, anyone can say whatever they want about your past, and it will not hurt you. The events have no power over you, so, therefore, others cannot gain power over you.

This idea really applies to all areas of life. Far too often we react to the people, conditions, or events around us, without exercising conscious control over our own thoughts and emotions. When things we like happen, we feel good, when things we don’t like happen, we feel bad. This may seem a perfectly normal, and even acceptable, way of going about life, but it puts you on an emotional roller coaster ride that you can’t get off of!

You cannot control all the conditions in your life.

Other people’s actions, chance events, weather, the economy…. these are all out of your control.

If how you feel is dependent on these conditions, then you are completely out of control.

And I think a lot of people really do feel out of control.

This is what this post is about: TAKING YOUR POWER BACK!

Do not give responsibility, or control of how you feel, and your own happiness, to anyone or anything, other than yourself. Period.

So I keep screwing up this attraction thing. I keep attracting the things I want, but then, when they’re almost in my grasp, something goes wrong and they slip through my fingers. Or it seems like I’ve got what I want, but then it blows up in my face, and I find out that wasn’t really what I wanted after all.

As I said in my last post on the Law of Attraction, we don’t really know what we want, we just know we want to be happy. The trick is we focus on the things we think will make us happy instead of actual happiness.

So why do things keep going wrong when I try to attract the things I think I want? Because I am still trying to be in CONTROL.

The problem with the over-simplified Law of Attraction is that it’s all about being in CONTROL. I’m going to choose exactly what I want and attract that so I won’t ever have to feel anything bad or ever be uncomfortable. My life will be PERFECT.

But what is control? CHOICE? Would I CHOOSE to be in control of every detail, every aspect of my life so that my entire life experience would be limited by what I can imagine? Would I really choose such a limited existence over the limitless possibilities of an infinite Universe? Do I really want CONTROL?

Trying to be in control is like fighting the tide; there is no controlling fate or the tides of the Universe, there is only the ILLUSION of control and a constant struggle to maintain it. And it is when we struggle that we suffer.

To be truly OPEN, to be truly FREE, is to let go of the illusion of control you are bound in, stop the struggle, and let the abundance of the Universe in, knowing, trusting, that it will provide not necessarily what is wanted, but always what is needed.

Also knowing that the Universe and your own soul will demand that you do, indeed, GROW, and that to grow you will have to leave your comfort zone.

So the equation for today would go something like: NEED for CONTROL = FEAR of GROWTH, FEAR of CHANGE

CHANGE – quite possibly the most terrifying word in existence, and yet it is the path to freedom.

Because it is when we change, when we face our fears, when life throws the hard shit at us and we get UNCOMFORTABLE that we find out who we truly are; we are confronted with the dark sides of ourselves and given an opportunity to transform them; we dig deep and find strength we never knew we had; we see what it is that truly nourishes our souls; we see what’s really important. It is in those moments that we can see clearly just how in control we really are, because ultimately we are in total control of our own happiness, and that is what is truly important.

Life is a series of opportunities and choices. The Universe provides the opportunities but we control the choices we make, and every moment is a new opportunity to choose happiness instead of fear, growth instead of control, freedom instead of illusion.

“How you do anything is how you do everything” – Jack Canfield

Or as I said to a friend the other day “If you can’t be happy grocery shopping, you can’t be happy doing anything.”